Strangers create innovation. Strangers discover new ways to solve problems. Vast swaths of strangers pursuing their own self interests enable other strangers pursuing their own self interest to achieve further success. I’m using the word strangers here to make the point that there is not any intentional cognizant collusion involved. This is how technology and innovation bursts occur; this is how every day advances occur; this is how traditions become traditions and how civilization evolves. Pretending that there’s a mighty apparatchik with the knowledge to do the same is folly, though the Democrats and the left continue to believe in this approach. (My hunch is that’s because they have no faith other than a Hegelian faith in the state, but that’s for another blog.)
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, working in a garage, pursuing their own goal, shaped innovation, birthed an industry, and changed the contours of human intellectual discovery. There wasn’t a Department of Personal Computers directing them.
Mark Zuckerberg was a genius geek at college and launched a social networking site, Facebook, that changed familial communication, business marketing, and, I’m sure, impacted countless others in ways of which I’m unaware. There wasn’t a Department of Social Networking directing him. (Though oddly, in what seems to be an acknowledgement of the government’s blithe myopia, there’s a government HHS website dedicated to enhancing your website–seriously: here.)
The other week, I was watching C-SPAN, and they had on a Phd. who was one of the engineers involved in designing the protocol that is the backbone of today’s communication. His name escapes me, but answering a question about whether he and his colleagues imagined that their invention would lead to WiFi, digital satellites, and the world wide web, among many other things, he said (and I paraphrase all of this) something like, “We didn’t foresee all of its uses because that’s impossible, so we designed the protocol in such a way that we didn’t consider what information it was carrying, only that it conformed to the protocol”.
That’s the apotheosis of the economic liberty/free market argument down to its core. He pursued his self interest and designed the protocol so that it can be used by strangers pursuing theirs. Strangers using it in ways he and his colleagues could never dream, on things they never imagined, solving problems that they never knew needed solving. This is the conservative argument for liberty and freedom and also why crony capitalism is so egregious. No one person contains all of the information required to direct an economy, a society, or to wisely choose which companies will succeed and which will fail.
Contrasting this approach with the collectivist’s “planning approach” reveals a paradox. The “economic liberty approach” does indeed acknowledge a community or collective, but a community of individuals (emphasis on individuals) seeking their own self interest, and in doing so, assisting other individuals in the community seeking theirs. The collectivist planner, however, sees the community or collective as a whole, not of individuals, but as a pliant group that can be planned, directed, and molded.
The over-educated blow hards in the administration follow the collectivist’s planning approach, and the results are evident. They cannot put their collective heads together and design how new jobs are to be created, products developed, or industries born. They’re not that smart. No one is. The depth of knowledge that is dispersed throughout the planet in human minds and experiences unknown to our own is beyond the ken of any individual. And believing otherwise is foolish. It’s only through the narcissistic arrogance of the “expert” who believes he’s the exception to this truth that we suffer the results of his experiments and thus prolong the redirection to prosperity.
